What about personal responsibility? I thought you were for smaller govt, personal freedoms, etc. Isn't one of the biggest complaints from Conservatives is that govt trying to control peeps too much? tell them how to live their lives? The drug war is yet another example of govt controlling us lowly citizens, telling us what we can and can't do. I suppose you also support Mayor Bloomberg's ban on large containers of pop....oh wait....

So far got nothing but crickets from the anti-freedom crowd....

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June 5th, 2013, 5:30 pm

Blueskies

Player of the Year - Offense

Joined: September 13th, 2007, 12:43 pmPosts: 2836

Re: The War on Pot Is Both Racist and Expensive, New Report

wjb21ndtown wrote:

If you think $6 billion would pay for all of the medical/drug/addiction treatment, you're fooling yourself, and I think the revenue would be much, much lower than alcohol.

Cigarettes are not as addictive as herione. That is a myth. You don't smoke one cigarette and become a "smoker for life." Many people have smoked one cigarette. Hell, I've smoked five cigarettes my whole life, over the period of 20 years, and three were just for the hell of it (as a joke)... Two of those were part of a Halloween costume.

What's a myth is the idea that using heroin once makes you a dope fiend for life. It's largely the same thing as morphine, it just carries a strong social stigma.

Except that nicotine does nothing to you and is only harmful to babies or if you take too much, which is impossible unless you're injecting or drinking it straight. Smoking is deadly because of the additives, not the nicotine. Remove the additives and it's nothing but a relaxant.

And Wags, you can call me ignorant because I disagree with what the article states, but making drugs illegal wasn't a racist choice and the ratios and statistics don't equal racism, they just show that a certain people use. That is what I called ignorant in the article. Race is irrelevant. And it's crappy journalism for the writer to even equate that. He's just looking for readers and controversy.

And the problems with the drug war as well as other problematic far-reaching laws is that the government has a real failure to enforce them. Users shouldn't be incarcerated unless they commit another crime. Dealers should be where the focus is. Treatment should be the result for those that use.

As for the small government argument, while I agree that there are plenty of far-reaching programs that just can't be effectively handled in the current way, I would never advocate for the elimination of all laws either. Some structure is still required. And while I agree, it's past time they legalize weed, a blanket legalization of all drugs is just asking for problems.

June 5th, 2013, 9:46 pm

regularjoe12

Off. Coordinator – Joe Lombardi

Joined: March 30th, 2006, 12:48 amPosts: 3955Location: Davison Mi

Re: The War on Pot Is Both Racist and Expensive, New Report

njroar wrote:

Except that nicotine does nothing to you and is only harmful to babies or if you take too much, which is impossible unless you're injecting or drinking it straight. Smoking is deadly because of the additives, not the nicotine. Remove the additives and it's nothing but a relaxant.

And Wags, you can call me ignorant because I disagree with what the article states, but making drugs illegal wasn't a racist choice and the ratios and statistics don't equal racism, they just show that a certain people use. That is what I called ignorant in the article. Race is irrelevant. And it's crappy journalism for the writer to even equate that. He's just looking for readers and controversy. And the problems with the drug war as well as other problematic far-reaching laws is that the government has a real failure to enforce them. Users shouldn't be incarcerated unless they commit another crime. Dealers should be where the focus is. Treatment should be the result for those that use.

As for the small government argument, while I agree that there are plenty of far-reaching programs that just can't be effectively handled in the current way, I would never advocate for the elimination of all laws either. Some structure is still required. And while I agree, it's past time they legalize weed, a blanket legalization of all drugs is just asking for problems.

I have to disagree with the bolded part. when Mj was initially illeagalized (is that a word??) it WAS due in large part to being a racial issue. the comon misconception at the time was that it "made black men go crazy and rape white women". rediculouis as it is, it's true. the black population was the primary users of pot at the time (at least that was the perception at the time) and it was banned with all kinds of racial motivations.

As far as it being a race issue today however, I'm with you and believe that to be garbage.

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June 6th, 2013, 9:49 am

TheRealWags

Modmin Dude

Joined: December 31st, 2004, 9:55 amPosts: 12278

Re: The War on Pot Is Both Racist and Expensive, New Report

regularjoe12 wrote:

njroar wrote:

And Wags, you can call me ignorant because I disagree with what the article states, but making drugs illegal wasn't a racist choice and the ratios and statistics don't equal racism, they just show that a certain people use. That is what I called ignorant in the article. Race is irrelevant. And it's crappy journalism for the writer to even equate that. He's just looking for readers and controversy. And the problems with the drug war as well as other problematic far-reaching laws is that the government has a real failure to enforce them. Users shouldn't be incarcerated unless they commit another crime. Dealers should be where the focus is. Treatment should be the result for those that use.

I have to disagree with the bolded part. when Mj was initially illeagalized (is that a word??) it WAS due in large part to being a racial issue. the comon misconception at the time was that it "made black men go crazy and rape white women". rediculouis as it is, it's true. the black population was the primary users of pot at the time (at least that was the perception at the time) and it was banned with all kinds of racial motivations.

From Wiki's article on Harry Anslinger:

Quote:

Anslinger has been accused to be responsible for racial themes in articles against marijuana in the 1930s.

“By the tons it is coming into this country — the deadly, dreadful poison that racks and tears not only the body, but the very heart and soul of every human being who once becomes a slave to it in any of its cruel and devastating forms…. Marihuana is a short cut to the insane asylum. Smoke marihuana cigarettes for a month and what was once your brain will be nothing but a storehouse of horrid specters. Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him….”[16]

"Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with (white) female students, smoking [marijuana] and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy"[17][18]

"Two Negros took a girl fourteen years old and kept her for two days under the influence of hemp. Upon recovery she was found to be suffering from syphilis."[18][19]

Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him

AH hahahahahahahaahahahaaa!that statment makes me wanna watch Reefer madness again. it simply amazes me the rediculous conclusions we humans will come to when we decide to be fear driven and hateful.

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June 6th, 2013, 10:44 am

TheRealWags

Modmin Dude

Joined: December 31st, 2004, 9:55 amPosts: 12278

Re: The War on Pot Is Both Racist and Expensive, New Report

njroar wrote:

Except that nicotine does nothing to you and is only harmful to babies or if you take too much, which is impossible unless you're injecting or drinking it straight. Smoking is deadly because of the additives, not the nicotine. Remove the additives and it's nothing but a relaxant.

Are you sure about that?

Mayo Clinic wrote:

DefinitionBy Mayo Clinic staffNicotine dependence — also called tobacco dependence — is an addiction to tobacco products caused by the drug nicotine. Nicotine dependence means you can't stop using the substance, even though it's causing you harm.

Nicotine produces physical and mood-altering effects in your brain that are temporarily pleasing. These effects make you want to use tobacco and lead to dependence. At the same time, stopping tobacco use causes withdrawal symptoms, including irritability and anxiety.

While it's the nicotine in tobacco that causes nicotine dependence, the toxic effects of tobacco result from other substances in tobacco. Smokers have much higher rates of heart disease, stroke and cancer than nonsmokers do.

Regardless of how long you've smoked, stopping smoking can improve your health. Many effective treatments for nicotine dependence are available to help you manage withdrawal and stop smoking for good. Ask your doctor for help.

Tobacco Products Are Designed for AddictionThe design and contents of tobacco products—including cigarettes, cigars, and smokeless tobacco (snuff [finely ground tobacco that can be dry, moist, or packaged in sachets] and chewing tobacco)—make them addictive. They deliver more nicotine and deliver it quicker than ever before. Nicotine is the highly addictive drug in these products that keeps people smoking or using them even when they want to quit. Like heroin or cocaine, nicotine changes the way the brain works—creating feelings of pleasure or satisfaction—and causes people who use tobacco products to crave more and more nicotine. Filtered and low-tar cigarettes are every bit as addictive and are no safer than other cigarettes. Youth are sensitive to nicotine and can feel dependent earlier than adults. Because of their addiction, about three out of four teen smokers end up smoking into adulthood, even if they intend to quit after a few years.

And Wags, you can call me ignorant because I disagree with what the article states, but making drugs illegal wasn't a racist choice and the ratios and statistics don't equal racism, they just show that a certain people use. That is what I called ignorant in the article. Race is irrelevant. And it's crappy journalism for the writer to even equate that. He's just looking for readers and controversy.

The illegality & race angle was covered above. That said, let me ask you a couple questions: Does racism exist in this country? If so, is it too far-fetched that someone holding this viewpoint and in a position of authority (police, lawyer, judge, counselor, etc) might in someway use their position in a less-than ideal manner? Do you think its at all possible that a traffic stop could occur for simply 'driving while non-white'?

For the record, and I think I've said this here before, I have personally experienced 'white favoritism' by police. When I lived on the 'south side' (barrio) the police were constantly on patrol; now living in a rural mostly white neighborhood, which happens to have a police substation less than a mile away, I rarely see any police, unless they're running back to the substation that is.

njroar wrote:

And the problems with the drug war as well as other problematic far-reaching laws is that the government has a real failure to enforce them. Users shouldn't be incarcerated unless they commit another crime. Dealers should be where the focus is. Treatment should be the result for those that use.

Pretty much agree here.

njroar wrote:

As for the small government argument, while I agree that there are plenty of far-reaching programs that just can't be effectively handled in the current way, I would never advocate for the elimination of all laws either. Some structure is still required. And while I agree, it's past time they legalize weed, a blanket legalization of all drugs is just asking for problems.

We're in agreement that structure is needed; not looking for anarchy. We'll have to agree to disagree on the blanket legalization, unless you could provide good reasons as to why you're for limiting personal liberties.

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June 6th, 2013, 11:05 am

TheRealWags

Modmin Dude

Joined: December 31st, 2004, 9:55 amPosts: 12278

Re: The War on Pot Is Both Racist and Expensive, New Report

regularjoe12 wrote:

Quote:

Hasheesh makes a murderer who kills for the love of killing out of the mildest mannered man who ever laughed at the idea that any habit could ever get him

AH hahahahahahahaahahahaaa!that statment makes me wanna watch Reefer madness again. it simply amazes me the rediculous conclusions we humans will come to when we decide to be fear driven and hateful.

Agreed. Fear is how the govt convinces us we need to hand them more control.

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June 6th, 2013, 11:06 am

njroar

Player of the Year - Offense

Joined: September 25th, 2007, 3:20 amPosts: 2833

Re: The War on Pot Is Both Racist and Expensive, New Report

Nicotine is addictive, yes. It's not mind altering to the degree of heroine or cocaine in the slightest. And the statements that nicotine makes you want tobacco is just false. It makes you want nicotine and right now, the most common way to get it is in cigarettes. It is a relaxant, not a mind-altering drug. Since I've been using an e-cig for over 3 years now, I can safely say that I never crave tobacco at all and I don't feel even remotely close to what I felt while smoking weed, let alone any other drug. It's a stress reliever, nothing more.

The average cigarette contains 1mg of nicotine. There's 20 cigs in a pack. The brand of e-cig I use now is 16mg of nicotine per cartridge and each one lasts about the same as a pack of regular cigs. If I were to use the cartridges with 24 or 36mg of nicotine, I get a headache, whereas if I were to take too much heroin or cocaine, I'd die. There's a reason nicotine isn't considered a class 1 drug like heroin or cocaine, although I agree that weed shouldn't be either.

As to the far-fetched reasoning.. Sure, there could be a racist cop that arrests someone for weed that lets a white person go, but then they'd have to be tried in the court system that is on a whole, much more left-leaning than the police are. That's where I think most people forget the entire system that is in place, and try to place the blame wrongly on race, when the only color that matters to the system in question is green. The prison system was built on this, the police budgets were built on this and they aren't going to give it up at the drop of a hat. Statistics or statements from the 1930's have no bearing on a system that didn't truly go into effect until more recently. Sure, there's been talks about drugs for close to a century, but the current prison system and ballooning police budgets are something far more recent. This isn't a system designed to bring down blacks. It's designed to bring in green.

The justice system is stacked against minorities, even though white people use drugs just as often.

Speaking at Howard University in April, I argued that big government is no friend to black Americans. The New York Times article earlier this month "Blacks Are Singled Out for Marijuana Arrests, Federal Data Suggests" reminded me how true this was.

A report released recently by the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that nationally, blacks were four times as likely as whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. It also indicated that these unfortunate numbers were true despite the fact that marijuana use is about the same for both black and white Americans.

Why is this happening? Why the vast disparity?

I spend so much time battling our gargantuan federal government that I can't possibly manage to keep up with all the damage it does, everywhere, every day and in so many countless ways. As former White House adviser David Axelrod said recently in defending Obama over the IRS scandal: "Part of being president is there's so much beneath you that you can't know because the government is so vast."

Interestingly, neither Axelrod nor Obama have ever shown much interest in taming the federal beast. In fact, virtually every solution they offer involves making government bigger. This often leaves the individual American citizen defenseless against a "vast" system that even its greatest champions can't outline, comprehend or be held accountable for.

Black Americans are being imprisoned far more than white Americans for marijuana possession for one primary reason: the federal government subsidizes it.

The New York Times reported: "Federal programs… continue to provide incentives for racial profiling, the report said, by including arrest numbers in its performance measures when distributing hundreds of millions of dollars to local law enforcement each year."

So, federal dollars are awarded to states or precincts that produce the right numbers? This alone is troubling because it incentivizes law enforcement to arrest as many people as it can. But why do black Americans get arrested far more than whites? The Times' continued: "Phillip Atiba Goff, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that police departments, partly driven by a desire to increase their drug arrest statistics, can concentrate on minority or poorer neighborhoods to meet numerical goals, focusing on low-level offenses that are easier, quicker and cheaper than investigating serious felony crimes."

Professor Goff concludes: "Whenever federal funding agencies encourage law enforcement to meet numerical arrest goals instead of public safety goals, it will likely promote stereotype-based policing and we can expect these sorts of racial gaps."

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and I have co-sponsored legislation that would effectively get rid of mandatory minimum sentencing. Due to mandatory minimums, many non-violent drug offenders have been imprisoned alongside rapists and murderers — often for sentences longer than rapists and murders. Many people's lives have been damaged or ruined for making one mistake, usually while these people are still young and more prone to make mistakes.

If alleged drug abusers George W. Bush and Barack Obama got caught and were penalized under our current mandatory minimum laws, both men would've been barely employable, not future presidents.

Mandatory minimums most harm those lacking in the means to defend themselves. These laws disproportionately target the poor and minorities. Getting rid of mandatory minimums simply means allowing judges to use their discretion in sentencing, rather than having to follow the current, draconian federal parameters that are totally detached from the very human situation at hand.

Similarly, why do we have a system that encourages police officers to arrest people against their better judgment as a revenue incentive? Why don't we allow local enforcement and courts to deal with these crimes on a case-by-case basis, without federal incentives to incarcerate more people?

Conservatives have long understood federal welfare programs haven't lessened the problem of poverty, only subsidized it. The federal government now also subsidizes, apparently, the imprisonment of non-violent drug offenders, particularly African Americans. It's not wise to make it financially attractive to keep people unemployed. It's not moral to make it financially attractive to keep people in jail.

I'm against drug use. I think anyone who encourages its use is wrong and is doing damage to society. But our current federal policies have done little to actually lessen drug use, while doing irreparable damage to even the most casual drug users — young men and women who've made mistakes just as a young Bush and Obama allegedly did.

The Tea Party has learned about government targeting, via the IRS. The Associated Press learned about this when the Department of Justice seized its phone records. Verizon customers learned about this when the National Security Agency collected their phone data.

Some African Americans have said that our justice system is often stacked against them. Some claim they feel they have been unfairly targeted. In the case of punishing people for marijuana possession, this turns out to be true.

Our government is simply too big and too out-of-control. When it comes to receiving fair justice, perhaps black Americans understand this best.

Rand Paul is a U.S. senator from Kentucky.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors.

I am mildly interested in 'The War on Pot is Expensive'. It is, and, like the war on alcohol a century ago, is doomed to failure. (I'm not saying it should not be fought. I'm saying that it will not be won.)

I am completely uninterested, and somewhat repulsed, to hear someone say the War on Pot is 'Racist'. Screw it. Lock everyone up and shoot them for good measure.

You want to know what is the most racist thing about the US, Race hustlers' being taken seriously.

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June 25th, 2013, 11:29 am

TheRealWags

Modmin Dude

Joined: December 31st, 2004, 9:55 amPosts: 12278

Re: The War on Pot Is Both Racist and Expensive, New Report

TruckinMack wrote:

I am mildly interested in 'The War on Pot is Expensive'. It is, and, like the war on alcohol a century ago, is doomed to failure. (I'm not saying it should not be fought. I'm saying that it will not be won.)

Are you for wasting millions / billions of taxpayer money on an unwinable 'war'? Just wondering why you feel that it is doomed for failure, yet that it should also be fought. Seems confusing.

TruckinMack wrote:

I am completely uninterested, and somewhat repulsed, to hear someone say the War on Pot is 'Racist'. Screw it. Lock everyone up and shoot them for good measure.

You want to know what is the most racist thing about the US, Race hustlers' being taken seriously.

Is it your position that 'racism' can not be used as a reason for anything? Why?

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June 25th, 2013, 11:40 am

regularjoe12

Off. Coordinator – Joe Lombardi

Joined: March 30th, 2006, 12:48 amPosts: 3955Location: Davison Mi

Re: The War on Pot Is Both Racist and Expensive, New Report

personallly Im calling Shennanniganns on the race card being used in current MJ laws myself. yes looking at the numbers amkes things look like it might be, but lets look at other criminal activity shall we?

Gang violence is committed mostly by minorities, are laws against Gangs racist?

i think calling thses laws racist is an excuse to overlook bigger and significantly more "real" problems.

Maybe racial profiling is the cause? maybe poverty levels cause the broke minority communities to become pharmacutical distributors and thats why the higher arrest rate? i dont know....and i'm not going to find out if they just call the surface issues racist and never take the time to find the root of the problem.

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June 25th, 2013, 11:58 am

TheRealWags

Modmin Dude

Joined: December 31st, 2004, 9:55 amPosts: 12278

Re: The War on Pot Is Both Racist and Expensive, New Report

For those interested, the

From Section III Methodology of said report, the Data Sources are from the FBI & census